A student zone at the Los Angeles Public Library. (courtesy)

The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation announced Tuesday that it has donated $1 million to the city’s public libraries to fund technology purchases for the libraries’ after-school homework centers used by thousands of the city’s children and teens.

The free after-school homework centers are located at 34 library branches throughout the city. The centers give students internet access and students can get help from library staff with homework, college applications and scholarship essays.

The centers have laptops, computers, tablets and printers available for students to use.

The Broad Foundation has donated $589.5 million to educational initiatives since 1999, including $144 million for public charter schools and $123 million to support public school district improvements, according to its website. A plan by the Broad Foundation leaked last year proposed expanding the number of charter schools in Los Angeles to half of all public schools. In June a new initiative, Great Public Schools Now, announced it will expand access for 160,000 students in failing schools in 10 low-income Los Angeles neighborhoods to successful schools it will help replicate or expand.

The endowment for the libraries was named in honor of Edythe Broad, Broad Foundation co-founder and wife of Eli Broad.

“When I was a child growing up in Detroit, my sister and I always went to the library, and I have such fond memories of how I could be transported through books,” Edythe Broad said in a statement. “For so many students who don’t have a place to study after school, libraries can provide a place to go. And today, libraries have so much more than books. Everything a student needs to do their homework is available at the library.”

The homework centers are often used by youth who are homeless, from low-income backgrounds and in foster care.

“We are asking our students to do so much more these days — to think critically, to solve complicated problems, despite all the distractions and challenges happening in their lives,” April Bain, an LA Unified high school math teacher, said in a statement. “You can’t think critically and solve complicated problems if you can’t hear yourself think or get internet access to complete an assignment. I love that this is providing an essential need for students — a safe, quiet space to learn.”

LA Unified re-opened all of its schools libraries when school started this month, though with under-stocked library collections filled with outdated materials.

“Many of my students don’t have computers or Internet access at home, so I encourage them to go to the public library after school to do their homework,” Phina Ihesiaba, a sixth-grade social studies teacher at KIPP Academy of Opportunity, said in a statement. “It’s great to have a safe space with the free tools and help they need.”

The latest grant follows a gift of $250,000 last year to the Library Foundation to increase the number of “student zones” in the city’s library system.

More than 100,000 children and teens use the Los Angeles Public Library.

“We are thrilled that the Broad Foundation is investing in young Angelenos through the Los Angeles Public Library,” said city librarian John F. Szabo. “Students across the city rely on their neighborhood branch libraries as an extension of their academics, taking advantage of services such as our online tutoring and coding workshops, and this gift will allow us to further our efforts to help every student succeed.”

A list of the library branches where the homework centers are located can be found here.

Two more people this week entered the March 7 race for LA Unified school board.

Gregory Martayan will join Nick Melvoin in challenging board President Steve Zimmer for his District 4 seat. And Joanne Baltierrez-Fernandez joins one other challenger in seeking an open seat in District 6.

Martayan and Baltierrez-Fernandez filed with the city Ethics Commission on Tuesday an intent to raise money for their respective races. Candidates officially file to run for the seats in November.

Zimmer has represented school board District 4, which includes the Westside and Hollywood, since 2009. In his latest re-election bid, he won with 52 percent of the vote.

Melvoin has taken a wide early lead in fundraising. The latest campaign finance records show Melvoin has raised $124,344 from Jan. 1 through June 30. Records show that Zimmer raised $7,304 in the same period.

Melvoin touted grassroots support for his campaign.

Zimmer said he has been focused on statewide ballot measures in the Nov. 8 election, including Prop. 55, an extension of income taxes on the wealthy for public education, and Prop. 58, which would repeal a law that prohibits non-English languages from being used in public schools. Zimmer said he is also working to elect Democrat Hillary Clinton as president.

Martayan did not immediately return a request for comment.

In the board District 6 race, where Monica Ratliff is not seeking re-election as she is running for Los Angeles City Council, Baltierrez-Fernandez joins Araz Parseghian in running for the seat. The district encompasses the east San Fernando Valley.

Neither candidate has reported any fundraising or spending to the Ethics Commission. Both just filed their intentions to run this month.

Baltierrez-Fernandez unsuccessfully ran for the 39th District state Assembly seat occupied by Patty Lopez. She came in fourth in the June primary.

Baltierrez-Fernandez, who served on the San Fernando City Council from 1994 to 1999, said Friday that as she was campaigning for the state Assembly seat, many LA Unified school district issues came up.

She is a mental health clinician and said she sees that there is a need for more mental health services in the public school system.

“Children can’t learn if they’re angry, depressed or worried,” she said.

The other seat up for election is in board District 2 occupied by Monica Garcia since 2006.

Four candidates have filed paperwork with the Ethics Commission to raise money to run for the seat, which covers East LA, Pico-Union, downtown Los Angeles and its surrounding neighborhoods.

Garcia has dominated early fundraising, the latest campaign finance records show. Seeking her third term on the seven-member board, Garcia collected $119,858 in donations between Jan. 1 and June 30. One challenger, Carl Petersen, raised $805 in the same period.

Other candidates for the seat are Berny L. Motto, Walter Bannister and Manuel “Manny” Aldana Jr., who all filed their paperwork within the past two weeks.

(Photo: IDEA Public Schools)

Three charter management organizations (CMOs) were named as finalists for the 2016 Broad Prize for Public Charter Schools, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools and The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation announced today.

The finalists are Success Academy Charter Schools in New York, IDEA Public Schools and YES Prep Public Schools. IDEA and YES Prep are in Texas, but IDEA announced recently that it is expanding for the first time beyond Texas and is eyeing numerous other states for new schools, including Washington, Idaho and Nevada.

• Read more: Big IDEAS: High-Achieving South Texas Charter Network Reveals National Expansion Plan

The winner of the $250,000 prize, which is given to the best-performing CMO serving significant numbers of low-income students and students of color, will be announced June 27 at the National Charter Schools Conference in Nashville, Tenn.

The Broad Foundation is based in Los Angeles, which has the most charter students of any district in the nation, but none of the finalists operate schools in LA, although eight that operate in LA were eligible this year. In 2014, KIPP Public Charter Schools, which operates 13 schools in Los Angeles as part of a national network, won the award.

The finalists are determined by a seven-member review board of national education experts who review “publicly available student performance and college-readiness data from the 2014-15 school year for 30 of the country’s largest public charter management organizations, compiled and analyzed by American Institutes for Research,” according to the Broad Foundation.

Congrats to @IDEAschools @SuccessCharters & @YESPrep on being named to the #BroadPrize top 3, and thank you for all you do for students.

— Eli Broad (@UnreasonableEli) May 18, 2016

“The Broad Prize is an opportunity to celebrate the success of charter schools that are improving academic performance while reducing achievement gaps,” said Nina Rees, president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, in a statement. “These three school systems are doing a phenomenal job of teaching all students and preparing them for a strong path ahead, and we really hope that public schools across the country can learn from their success.”

Priscilla Wohlstetter is a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Education and has been on the review panel since the charter award was first given out five years ago. She explained that among the criteria the review panel looks at, larger CMOs tend to be favored because evidence of having a replicable model is ranked high. Since many large CMOs in LA are focused solely on LA, this hurt their chances of winning the Broad prize.

“Many of the CMOs in LA tend to be very limited into certain geographic areas. And many people on the board — although there are no formal guidelines — come to the conclusion that if a charter management organization can succeed in different districts and different states with different authorizers, they are more replicable,” Wohlstetter said in an interview.

“Los Angeles’s public charter management organizations have always had a strong showing in the CMOs eligible for The Broad Prize for Public Charter Schools,” said Gregory McGinity, executive director of The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, in an email. “Networks like Green Dot Public Schools, Alliance College-Ready Public Schools, Partnerships to Uplift Communities and others provide a great education to their students, especially those from low-income families and communities of color. In 2014, KIPP Schools, which operates KIPP LA, won The Broad Prize for Public Charter Schools. With each year of the prize, we see a growing number of charter networks with impressive student achievement. We expect charter management organizations across the country to continue to raise the bar for what’s possible when it comes to providing great educational opportunities for all students.”

For more than a decade the foundation also awarded an annual $1 million prize to a top school district in the nation, but paused the prize in 2015 after saying a worthy district could not be found.

Eli and Edythe Broad

“In this fifth year of The Broad Prize for Public Charter Schools, we had the highest number of eligible charter management organizations, which demonstrates that these systems are growing and serving more low-income families and communities of color,” McGinity said in a statement. “These three charter organizations are proving that all students can achieve at high levels, and we’re pleased to recognize their continuing progress.”

The Broad Foundation and National Alliance for Public Charter Schools provided the following descriptions of the finalists:

• IDEA Public Schools is a network of 44 elementary, middle and high schools in Texas that serves more than 24,000 students in San Antonio, Austin and the Rio Grande Valley. IDEA’s student population is 87 percent low-income and 95 percent Hispanic. In 2014-2015, all of IDEA’s schools were in the top 30 percent of Texas schools for advanced proficiency for low-income and Hispanic students in elementary, middle and high school English, math and science. That same year, 97 percent of their Hispanic students took the ACT, while the high school graduation rate for IDEA’s Hispanic students was 99 percent.
• Success Academy Charter Schools is the largest public charter school network in New York City, with 34 elementary, middle and high schools serving 11,000 students in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. Success Academy’s student population is 76 percent low-income and 93 percent black or Hispanic. In the analysis of assessment data for the 2014-2015 school year, Success Academy’s low-income, black and Hispanic middle school students outperformed their non-low-income and white peers statewide in English, math and science at both the proficient level and the advanced level.
• YES Prep is a network of 15 elementary, middle and high schools that serves more than 10,000 students in Houston. YES Prep’s student population is 87 percent low-income and 85 percent Hispanic. In 2014-2015, YES Prep’s Hispanic high school students scored in the top 20 percent of all high schools in Texas at both the proficient and advanced levels. Nearly 60 percent of YES Prep’s Hispanic students took an Advanced Placement (AP) course that year, with nearly half of those students achieving a passing score of 3 or higher. Ninety-six percent of YES Prep’s Hispanic students took the SAT, and 88 percent graduated.

The blue stars represent current IDEA schools; the yellow dots represent schools expected to open in 2018. The blue dots represent regions of interest for future growth where IDEA has connected with local leaders, while the red dots are regions that IDEA is interested in exploring but hasn’t communicated with. (Photo credit: IDEA Public Schools)

While none of the finalists were CMOs that operate schools in Los Angeles, the Broad Foundation is heavily involved in the city and is funding a non-profit, Great Public Schools Now, that seeks to expand access to high-quality public schools in Los Angeles, including charter schools. The plan has been denounced by opponents on the school board and the LA teachers union, UTLA, as one that threatens the financial solvency of the district due to the potential enrollment loss.

While an early plan that was reported last summer called for enrolling half of all LA Unified students in charters, Great Public Schools Now has since said the plan is being retooled and will also include financing for high-performing district schools and models, although the full details have yet to be released.

Disclosure: LA School Report partners with The 74, whose co-founder and editor-in-chief, Campbell Brown, sits on the board of Success Academy.

UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl

More than 20,000 parents, students and teachers in LA Unified are expected to stage a “Walk-In” before school on Wednesday orchestrated by the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools to protest charter expansion and call for greater investment in public education.

“We have coordinated this with the school district and the superintendent’s office,” said Alex Caputo-Pearl, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, which is leading the LA part of the nationwide protest.

In fact, Superintendent Michelle King will be attending one of the demonstrations at Hamilton High School in West Los Angeles along with school board president Steve Zimmer and vice president George McKenna as well as American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten.

The purpose of the demonstration, they said, is “to fight back corporate privatization and stand up for fully-funded public education; to reclaim the promise of public education in LA.”

Specifically, their mission is to protest the proposed Greater Public Schools Now (GPS Now), which plans a major expansion of school funding and an increase in charter schools for the area. “We reject Broad-Walmart’s plan to undermine LAUSD,” according to the mission statement. “We call on Broad and the Waltons to pay their fair share in taxes to support quality schools that serve all students.”

King issued a statement saying, “Great progress is taking place in our classrooms and schools, thanks to the thousands of talented and dedicated teachers in LA Unified. The United Teachers Los Angeles ‘Walk-in’ will take place before the start of the school day on Feb. 17, allowing our employees to celebrate their success without disrupting the teaching and learning process. We are grateful to our teachers and join with them in recognizing their pride and enthusiasm for their work.”

UTLA’s website included a sign-up list and offered information tools and flyers to print out at the 70 school sites.

The flyers they plan to hand out to parents, staff and community members state, “We stand together—parents, educators, students, school staff and community organizations—to send a strong message to policymakers and billionaires like Eli Broad that public education is NOT for sale. We are reclaiming our school and committing to work in solidarity to ensure that our school serves the needs of its community.”

Maria Palma was incensed when her child brought home a flyer asking her to attend a meeting after the demonstration at the San Jose Elementary and Highly Gifted Magnet School in Mission Hills. She complained to her school principal and district representatives.

“The communication is disrespectful to families in our community since it does not clearly state the issues at stake or the political agenda that is behind the ‘Walk-In,'” Palma said in an email. “With the event framed as a school-sponsored activity, it creates a situation where children may feel marginalized if their families choose not to attend, or participate in opposition to the political messages behind the event. It is inappropriate for a public school to advocate a political agenda.”

Palma said she is not going to send her child to school on Wednesday because of the event.

The alliance of parents, youth, community organizations and labor groups said they would be holding demonstrations the same day in 19 other cities at school districts facing similar issues, including Chicago, Milwaukee, San Diego, Dallas and Baltimore.

The demonstration is expected to last 30 to 45 minutes and will end before school begins.

“Given the never-ending attacks on public education that many of our cities endure, this provides a positive action that says that these are our schools and our communities,” the “Walk-In” flyer states.

Students at KIPP Raíces Academy in Los Angeles

By Richard Whitmire

Recent big-dollar donations from pro-charter philanthropists leave traditional educators sputtering: Why don’t they just donate their money to us?

Good question, and one that was raised in Los Angeles recently in light of a possible huge gift from philanthropist Eli Broad and others that appears headed mostly to charter schools. LAUSD board member Scott Schmerelson wondered out loud, the L.A. Times reported: Why not us?

The same questions are being raised about the recently announced $100 million education fund coming from Netflix’s Reed Hastings. If past predicts future, most of that money will end up in charter schools — which critics say is part of a larger plot to destroy traditional public schools.

So why do these guys (and they are mostly guys who made it big in Silicon Valley) seem to distrust our neighborhood schools?

The answer offered by charter critics is pretty simple. Big money hates big unions. That’s the take of charter antagonist Diane Ravitch. Her comments about the Walton Family Foundation, which has announced it will invest $1 billion over the next five years to back new charter schools: “The Walton Family Foundation, which was created by the billions earned by Walmart, is anti-union,” wrote Ravitch in her blog. “Walmart does not have unions. It has fought unionization and had to be pushed kicking and screaming to agree to pay minimum wages, eventually.”

So that’s it? Big money hates big unions?

Based on several years of reporting on charter schools, especially California charters for a book about Rocketship charters in Silicon Valley, I see a somewhat different narrative.

In truth, these entrepreneurs are often agnostic about unions, some even favorably inclined, such as Hastings, who when I met with him praised the union leaders he worked with on the California State Board of Education. (Don’t get him started on local school boards, his real beef with traditional schools.)

Here’s the nut of their aversion to traditional schools: When discussing how districts hire, fire and promote, a system dictated partly by union contracts, these entrepreneurs become near-apoplectic.

At a Texas conference Steve Jobs once asked rhetorically about school districts: “What kind of person could you get to run a small business if you told them that when they came in, they couldn’t get rid of people that they thought weren’t any good? Not really great ones, because if you’re really smart, you go, ‘I can’t win.'”

While reporting the Rocketship book I spent hours with co-founder John Danner, a Stanford-educated electrical engineer who cashed in his software company and then decided to tackle education problems. To get experience, Danner taught in a high poverty school in Nashville.

One day when he thought he had become a consistently successful teacher he went to the principal to ask about joining school leadership. The answer: Be patient, stay in the classroom for several more years, and you might have a shot.

Here was a Silicon Valley startup star, the former CEO of a publicly traded company, being told to sit tight and log more seat time. Neither Danner, nor Jobs, could imagine achieving success by rewarding software engineers based on seat time.

Danner often pointed to union contracts he thought made schools unworkable. “Look, the union contract in San Jose Unified is 452 pages long,” he told me. “We’re a startup. The whole point of a startup is to be flexible. The job changes every day.”

And that’s the real point about these guys: They’re not so much anti-union as they are pro-startup. Tech CEOs live in a world where a single talented software guy binging through a weekend can solve a problem that has stymied platoons of software experts for months. You pay that guy the same?

Here’s how they view schools: They hire from a lower-level talent pool (based on college SAT scores), reward based on seat time and lay off based on seniority. That just drives them crazy. It’s more about wasting talent than loathing unions.

Does that make tech CEOs right and school superintendents and unions wrong? Not necessarily. As Danner found out, even charter schools can’t be disrupted like tech companies. But it does help explain why these big funders avoid traditional districts.

There are other reasons for the distrust. All the funders I met were well aware of the 1993 Annenberg Challenge gifts: $500 million to public schools over five years, gifts that went pretty much nowhere.  What kind of entrepreneur pours money into a disruptive-resistant enterprise? Better to go charter.

The Walton money got steered away from districts as a result of John Walton’s frustrating experience working as a donor with San Diego schools. (Sorry Diane; it’s not all about unions.)

Another recent parallel to the Annenberg gifts may be the Broad Prize, which rewarded traditional school districts based on their ability to narrow achievement gaps. Since 2002 the Broad Foundation poured about $16 million into prizes alone.

In 2014 the foundation suspended the prize for public schools but kept the charter school prize. Why? The slow rate of progress in traditional districts. Eli Broad hasn’t given up on traditional districts: Over the past 15 years the foundation has invested nearly $600 million in education, a mix of traditional and charter schools. The Broad Center-trained residents continue to be in demand in districts across the country.

But most of the new gift will probably end up in L.A. charters. Why? That’s where the “high quality” school seats are found.

Finally, there’s the simple motive of any donor: I want to see results.

With charters, donors can pick a leader or philosophy they admire and then visit to see results, said Jeffrey Henig, co-author of a new book on philanthropists. Said Henig: “Giving to a district feels more like paying taxes.”

This article was produced in partnership with The74Million.org, a news organization funded in part by the Walton Family Foundation.  

Richard Whitmire is a senior fellow at the Kauffman Foundation and the author of several education books.

Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa

Two and a half years ago, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa left his office steering the nation’s second-largest city with a legacy of pushing the kind of changes in the school system that education reformers relish.

Trying to make good on a campaign promise to fix the city’s schools, he fought the teachers union in court to limit seniority-protected layoff policies (he won) and supported another court challenge that sought to incorporate student test scores into teacher evaluations (no clear victory yet on that one).

He successfully lobbied lawmakers to wrest control of the school district from its elected school board (the courts turned him down), aggressively expanded choices for parents, including charter schools, founded the non-profit Partnership for Los Angeles Schools to take over the city’s lowest-performing schools and raised a boatload of money to help elect reform-oriented school board members.

Since leaving office Villaraigosa, 63, who drew national attention as the city’s first modern-day Hispanic mayor, has been stumping for Hillary Clinton, teaching at USC and traveling the country giving corporate speeches. Most recently, the man who tried to remake the sprawling Los Angeles Unified School District while in office has been singled out as a likely gubernatorial candidate.

In an extensive interview last week, we spoke with the former mayor about the political challenges he faced, what he told Eli Broad about his foundation’s $490 million proposal to dramatically expand charter schools (he’s for it with some caveats) and national education controversies. Take, for example, Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, a case before the Supreme Court in which justices are weighing whether charging mandatory union dues to cover costs for activities like collective bargaining violates teachers’ free speech rights. The justices heard oral arguments in January and will have to issue a decision by the end of their term in June. If the Supreme Court sides with the plaintiffs, their ruling could severely hamper a major fundraising vehicle for teachers unions across the country but also support educators who feel union leaders use their money on political causes they don’t agree with.

Here’s what Villaraigosa had to say about Friedrichs: 

I do not support the appellants in this matter. … In a democratic society, it’s critical that workers have an opportunity to organize and collectively bargain their wages, their hours, their working conditions. … I believe the agency fee issue that is particularly in question is one that is very important. Unions have a duty (to provide) fair representation. I worked for them for eight years. They are, by law, required to represent people, even if they are not union members. I think it’s important that those non-union members pay their dues so that they can be represented fairly. I do not support the plaintiffs in that matter at all. … In fact, I am vehemently against it. … At the same time I am vehemently against the status quo where African-American children and English language learners are relegated to the bottom. … We have to stand up for these kids too. You can be pro-union while at the same time stand up for the civil rights of these kids.

On the Great Public Schools Now initiative, a $490 million proposal by the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and other advocates to increase charter schools, a plan Villaraigosa said he is heavily involved with.

Well, I’ve already said I’m open to providing parents and particularly parents of failing and low-performing schools with better options. I support charters, successful charters. But I have also said that I believe that we should include a broader range of schools including traditional public schools that want to set a higher standard. … So what I said to Eli and them is I could support expanding charters, even dramatically. But that effort should be open to a much broader cross section of models (such as) traditional public schools (and) hybrids like my own, not just charter. … I think initially there were some who thought it should just be charters, but I think they have been convinced that in order to be successful we have to work together. We have to collaborate with the union, with parents, with charters (and) traditional public schools to improve the quality of education now in (Los Angeles) Unified. And we can only do that together.

On the perception that education reform is often implemented top-down and engineered by an elite group:

As a general proposition there is no question that most of what’s put forth as public policy priorities and the changes that emanate from them … come from the top down. Historically, that’s true. Actually, I think, with respect to the (education reform) effort, what distinguishes it is that it is more focused on parent empowerment and involvement. They have often been, particularly poor parents, missing in the equation. They have not been given their due as stakeholder. They are the ultimate consumer. … This notion that we drop off our kids and aren’t responsible for their education is misguided and a recipe for failure. We have got to include parents. We have got to engage them.

On what would need to happen politically and policy-wise to improve Los Angeles schools:

I think the Partnership Schools is the model. I think we’ve got to set higher standards. We’ve got to focus on teacher training and (select) principals, who as a first priority are instructional leaders, who are collaborative with parents and teachers. … I think at some point we are going to need more resources, but as I said to many people, “Before the public will give you more resources … they’ve got to see that you are doing more with the money you got.”

On his nonprofit, the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools:

If we were a school district we would be as large as Santa Monica-Malibu (Unified School District). It’s the largest turnaround effort in the country (and) these are traditional public schools. I think some of the elements of success we have (are) we hire educational leaders with a track record of turning failing schools into successful ones. (We hire) people who set high standards for the kids and people who understand that it’s important to collaborate with both parents and teachers while at the same time putting the interest of kids first. …When we started out there was a 44 percent graduation rate (at Los Angeles Unified). By the time I left there was a 72 percent graduation rate. … I’m very proud of what we did. We set a higher bar. … We’ve got to continue. We can’t rest on our laurels. … We should have (a) 100 percent graduation rate for virtually every one of those kids.

Does he have any regrets about the way he handled education issues in the city: 

I initially felt that we needed someone (to be held) accountable for success in our schools. And I do not believe that seven people, a (school) board and less than 10 percent of the (city’s) voters is the best mechanism for accountability and responsibility. I thought that as mayor, the buck should stop with me. I was willing to partner with the school district to improve our schools. Obviously, I was successful in getting the legislature to approve that … and give the mayor a role in LA. But in the end the courts … overturned that legislation so I had to go to a Plan B. Plan B was to help elect a group of school board members that would be more cooperative and set higher standards and give parents more choices. … That was such a radical paradigm shift that it created a furor and a level of conflict that was never my intention to create.

Was he surprised by the pushback he received in response to part of his education agenda:

Yeah, remember I worked for the teachers union. I believe in unions. I am unabashedly a progressive. I didn’t understand why there would be so much pushback. My schools were union, but I also believed in parental choice and, particularly for kids who were in low-performing to failing schools, I believe their parents had a right to a choice and that they had a right to go to a school where their kids could succeed. I was surprised at the pushback.

Why he was willing to engage in political fights over education issues: 

My only motivation was fighting for the civil rights of poor kids. I tell people it’s really simple. I recognize the historical nature of our election, the first (Hispanic to become mayor) in 133 years. I felt that the role of the first is not to bang on your chest and say how great I am. The role of the first is to acknowledge that you are here on the shoulders of others and to open up the door for the rest. I thought the only way you could do that is through education. I don’t think anyone was looking to engage in the kind of … conflict we had for eight years. … I moved ahead (be)cause I believe this issue is the most important issue facing the state and the nation. When you look at the Black Lives Matter movement, and you look at the growing poverty in California and America, you got to ask yourself why. The answer is simple: Too many of our kids aren’t going to graduate from high school and go to college. Communities of color, oftentimes, more of them are going to penal institutes than institutions of higher learning. I just don’t believe that that’s a paradigm that can work for us.

On whether the union was his biggest obstacle to bringing about more change in Los Angeles schools:

I always tell people, it was a city and a state that refused to invest in these kids. … Money does matter. We have failed as a society to make investments in these people, to create a safety net for them, and we wonder why there are so many disaffected people, angry with their circumstances. They have lost hope. I think it’s incumbent on all of us. It wasn’t just the unions. We all say we want better schools, but we haven’t wanted to invest in them in the way that we should.

Who do you listen to on education issues: 

Well, historically it was Ramon Cortines, John Deasy, Marshall Tuck (and) Joan Sullivan … but also parents (and) teachers. I don’t think we can listen to one stakeholder group to the detriment of the rest. Teachers and the unions are important, so are parents. I think the community overall is important.

When will you decide on running for governor:

I would just say that sooner rather than later…I don’t want to talk too much about (the race for) governor.

What advice would you give students about their education: 

I’d give it to the parents. I’d say, “Put your children in the best school you can.”

This article was produced in partnership with The74Million.org.

Scott Schmerelson

The LA Unified board today put itself on record as opposing a proposal that originated with the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation to expand the number of charter schools in the district in the years ahead.

By a 7-0 vote, the board made it clear that it would do what it could to discourage the effort by the Broad-affiliated group, Great Public Schools Now, to grow what is already the largest charter school population of any school district in the country. At the same time, the board vowed to intensify efforts toward improving educational opportunities within traditional district schools as a way to discourage more students from moving into charters.

“We have thrown down the gauntlet to big business to be very careful with how they deal with LAUSD,” said Scott Schmerelson, whose resolution was also supported by all the district’s labor partners as well as many parents. “They will not take over our district.”

The vote followed a lengthy and sometimes passionate debate in which the board’s vice president, George McKenna, emerged as a surprise supporter of charter schools as an option to traditional schools. Rarely has any member, apart from Mónica García, expressed such unvarnished support for the role charters play in LA Unified.

It was McKenna who introduced the idea in debate that any school that educates a child is a valuable asset, saying, “I don’t care who saves my kids. Just save my kids.”

McKenna also had a kind word for Broad, saying he doesn’t consider the billionaire philanthropist “a villain.”

“We have not as a district admitted our culpability and our own ineffectiveness in dealing with our children,” McKenna said, adding, “What are we committed to, more than ‘Go. away, go away.’ I don’t believe in bogeymen.”

Underlying the board’s discomfort over the charter plan is the district’s slowly declining enrollment, a trend exacerbated by the appeal of charters to many parents. Even now, tens of thousands of LA Unified students are on charter school waitings lists. For months, the district has been struggling to develop ideas on how to stem the outflow.

In expressing support for Schmerelson’s measure, McKenna said, “I’m not anti-charter; I’m not for charters, either. I want to make our schools work, first, to make them competitive so we can compete on our terms.”

A spokesman for Great Public Schools Now said the group would have no response to passage of the resolution.

A major point within the debate was whether to keep the language general or to specify Broad as the originator of the plan that has roiled the district since it was introduced last summer. It was revised late last year to include support for some district schools as well as charters, in part as a response to harsh public reaction.

Mónica Ratliff wanted to insert Broad’s name but settled on the name of the plan. She said, “Eli Broad must know the impact on the district in the long run if that plan was to go forward. This plan was not created to strengthen LA Unified. I want that to be on the record.”

She added, “He’s a smart guy, that Eli Broad. He did not come up with this willy-nilly. There is public consternation with the plan, and it’s become a softer gentler plan and that did not happen without pubic speaking out in a lot of different areas.”

Ultimately, the board discussed various options and concluded to leave the wording that the board would “stand opposed to internal and external initiatives that seek to reduce public education in Los Angeles to an educational marketplace and our children to market shares, while not investing in district-wide programs and strategies that benefit every student whom we are sworn to serve.”

Prior to the debate, a parade of supporters and detractors made their sentiments known to the board members. A group of charter school employees expressed support during a morning meeting, and opponents, including the district’s labor partners, criticized the plan later in the day.

Richard Vladovic raised concerns about the ramifications of declining enrollment that the Broad plan would create. He had originally thought he was going to talk about how the district is too big and recommend making the district smaller, but said privately, “I didn’t think the board would be unified in this resolution.”

Board President Steve Zimmer said he appreciated the board’s coming together to give “a statement that fully recognizes the spectrum of lenses we have on this board.” He said, “I want to call to my own and all of our own higher angels today and moving forward.”

Zimmer said the board “needs to look at the models for of excellent schools across all sectors that have been identified and invest in all schools and if there’s philanthropic investment to make them excellent then why wouldn’t we encourage that?”

Earlier in the day, the board unanimously passed a Ratliff-sponsored resolution that called for making charter schools as transparent in providing information to parents as traditional schools are required.

Sarah Angel of the California Charter Schools Association said although she wasn’t thrilled with Ratliff’s resolution, there was more cooperation in working with Ratliff to refine her resolution than there had been with Schmerelson, who did not meet with the association in crafting his measure.

“These two resolutions are a contrast of public policy,” Angel told the board. She said Ratliff’s resolution “although not perfect, is not draining time and resources away from charter students. On the other hand, we had a different experience with Mr. Schmerelson. Myths and charter rhetoric made its way into the resolution and continues polarization and politics.”

After the vote, Angel added, “There is the sense right now that the school board is more open than before to seeking genuine solutions and common ground, hopefully without sacrificing urgency on behalf of families that need better schools. We’re hopeful that the loudest and most extreme voices on all sides will quiet down and give way to authentic, results-focused collaboration for students. Education should never be an ‘us versus them’ situation, and we all have the opportunity right now to find a third way.”

Scott Schmerelson has revised his LA Unified board resolution that attacks an outside group’s plan to expand the number of charter schools in the district. A majority of the seven board members has expressed opposition to the plan.

But a shift in mission from the group — Great Public Schools Now, supported by the Broad Foundation and others — combined with the changed language in the resolution, suggests it might be more difficult for him to achieve a 7-0 vote from a board that includes several members supportive of charter schools.

The resolution will be voted on at the Dec. 8 board meeting. It is largely symbolic because state law provides school boards only a limited ability to deny legitimate charter applications.

In the resolution he introduced last month, Schmerelson called for a declaration that the school board “opposes the Broad Foundation plan.” It now says the board “stands opposed to external initiatives that seek to reduce public education to an educational marketplace and our children to market shares while not investing in District-wide programs and strategies that benefit every student.”

But officials of Great Public Schools Now say they have revised their plan to include investing in some traditional district schools, including pilots, magnets and other high-performing schools with large numbers of children receiving free and reduced-price lunch.

While those schools do not represent the entirety of LA Unified, the inclusion of them suggests that Great Public Schools Now is seeking to reduce opposition to the plan by addressing at least one major concern of the board, that the initiative would ignore children in regular district schools. 

Further, leaders of the group say they have dropped any language or reference that frames its mission in terms of “market share.”

Schmerelson says he hasn’t had a change of heart, that the revised resolution still reflects his staunch opposition to the plan. In an email to LA School Report, he said he does not consider his revision “a major shift to the original intent of my resolution,” asserting that he is “unaware of any other initiative at this time that identifies LAUSD students in terms of ‘market share.’”

He pointed to another part of the his revision, a commitment to a long list of strategies aimed at attracting and retaining students by developing “a framework for excellent public schools and improved outcomes for every student.”

The list includes such familiar issues as improving student achievement, helping young children overcome the impact of poverty, funding for the arts, assuring student safety and improving student attendance.

“As a new Board Member, I am trying to better define our responsibility to the future of LAUSD and to all our children who deserve an excellent public education despite per pupil resources that rank among the lowest in the nation,” Schmerelson said in the email, adding, “I remain opposed and incensed by all strategies that are clearly designed to privatize public education at the expense of our neediest children who rely on our neighborhood schools.”

At the very least, passage of the revised resolution would put down a marker down to Greater Public Schools Now, forcing the group to make good on its word to do more for traditional schools if the effort proceeds.

At the same time, the new language, nuanced as it may be, could make it easier for the three board members sympathetic to charters — Ref Rodriguez, Mónica García and Richard Vladovic — to vote against it without drawing condemnation from the teachers union, UTLA, which is perhaps the charter expansion group’s staunchest adversary.

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]]> https://www.laschoolreport.com/charter-group-expanding-mission-to-include-support-for-lausd-schools/ Thu, 19 Nov 2015 17:14:21 +0000 http://laschoolreport.com/?p=37504

Anita Landecker

In what would appear to be a strategic shift, the organization leading an effort to open more charter schools in LA Unified now intends to expand its mission to support traditional public schools that serve low-income children.

The organization, incorporated as Great Public Schools Now, is an outgrowth of a plan by the Broad and other foundations to create enough new charter schools to serve half of the district student population within eight years.

The foundations’ initial plan, articulated through a draft proposal over the summer, did not include consideration of investment in traditional district schools. But the plan now under development has been widened to include a goal of investing in pilot, magnet and other   high-performing district schools that have large numbers of children receiving free and reduced-price lunch.

“In one of the early meetings, the idea was raised, and people said, ‘Definitely, let’s do it’ “ said Anita Landecker, the interim executive director of Great Public Schools Now. “I don’t know how yet; it hasn’t been worked out, but there is an interest in helping high-quality schools that serve low-income kids.”

The willingness of the group to invest in district schools comes in some measure as a response to widespread criticism of the original Broad plan. Opponents, including members of the district school board and the LA teachers union, UTLA, have attacked the proposal as dangers for public education that would cost the district programs and jobs and leave half the student population with inferior assets.

Board President Steve Zimmer, perhaps the most critical of the seven board members, dismissed it as a “some kids, not all kids” plan that he would fiercely oppose.

Landecker described the new approach as an effort that would blunt some of the criticism even as the major thrust of the effort remains adding charter schools to satisfy the growing public demand for them and reducing the long lists of students on waiting lists to get in.

She used as an example a magnet school with dozens of students eager to fill a limited number of openings. “We’d like to figure out what it would take to expand the number of kids who could get to such a high-performing schools,” she said. “I don’t know what that looks like yet, but I know there’s interest in doing that.”

Just how much money would be directed to district schools has not been determined, she said. The ultimate shape of the plan would depend on a number of factors, including more feedback from community groups — “from all kinds of people” she said, “including detractors” — as well as from the school board. She said efforts are now underway to schedule individual meetings with board members to gauge their interest, ideas and concerns.

The organization is also looking to form a Board of Directors, hire a permanent executive director and start raising money. The goal, she said was $50 million a year, for a total of $400 million by the eight year.

The $490 million cited in the draft plan “was aspirational,” she said, but meeting the yearly target was probable. “We wouldn’t have done this if we didn’t think we could raise a fair amount of money,” she added.

While the overall spending plan remains a work in progress, Landecker said several overarching ideas are likely to be consdered. One, she mentioned, is developing a leadership program for teachers and principals with the idea that more high-quality people means more high-quality schools. Another is to spend money where schools, charter or otherwise, have a degree of autonomy over budget, hiring decisions and use of resources.

For now, it’s does not appear that the shift in mission would will temper opposition by UTLA, which has organized several rallies around the district to oppose the plan and still features a photo of Eli Broad on the UTLA website with the admonition, “Hit the road, Broad.”

“It doesn’t change our view of the Broad-WalMart initiative,” UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl said in an email message. “Eli Broad realized that his plan to dismantle the district, stifle democratic decision-making, and create an unregulated system that leaves high-needs students behind and doesn’t guarantee parent involvement – he realized his plan isn’t what the people of Los Angeles want. But this doesn’t change his record of funding similar efforts in Louisiana and Detroit, or the language in his initiative that bases his plan on seeing children as ‘market share.’”

Pointing to LA Unified’s soaring numbers of students living in poverty and learning English, Caputo-Pearl suggested, “If Broad and other billionaires want to ensure a great education for every child, they should invest half a billion dollars, and more, in an LAUSD foundation, run by the democratically elected school board, to fund sustainable neighborhood community schools that address the myriad educational and socio-economic needs of our students.”

The school board’s view of the shift in mission is less clear — but probably predictable. While Zimmer did not respond to a request for comment yesterday, he and three of his colleagues have publicly expressed discomfort with the original plan, and the next meeting, Dec. 7, has a resolution scheduled for a vote, to condemn it even though the board is legally barred from denying charter applications based solely on sentiment.

]]> https://www.laschoolreport.com/charter-group-says-lausd-anti-broad-measure-appears-unlawful/ Tue, 10 Nov 2015 17:40:12 +0000 http://laschoolreport.com/?p=37354 LA Unified school board member Scott Schmerelson is bringing a resolution before the board today, asking it to go on record opposing a plan by the Broad Foundation to add 260 new charter schools to the district over the next eight years.

The plan has drawn rebuke from other board members and the LA teachers union, UTLA, which organized protests on the issue across this city this morning.

But the resolution, which appears largely symbolic, raises one key question: Other than objecting to the charter plan, what can the board really do to stop it?

According to the California Charters School Association (CCSA), a close reading of the state’s 1992 Charter School Act reveals the answer: Not much.

“The act is very clear in the statutes that charter schools should be encouraged and it narrows the grounds on which a school board can deny a charter petition. So it does not give school boards wide discretion,” said Ricardo Soto, general counsel for CCSA.

Board President Steve Zimmer has strongly denounced the Broad plan, previously telling LA School Report it is “not an all-kids plan or an all-kids strategy. It’s very explicitly a some-kids strategy, a strategy that some kids will have a better education at a publicly-funded school that assumes that other kids will be injured by that opportunity.”

But missing from Zimmer’s denunciation — then or since — is a plan to oppose the Broad effort in any practical way, demonstrating how limited even the most motivated school board is when it comes to stopping the proliferation of charter schools. And according to a new report out today by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, Los Angeles continues to serve the largest number of charter school students in the country, with a current waiting list of nearly 70,000.

The Charter Schools Act of 1992 lays out clear guidelines upon which a school board can deny a charter school application: Philosophical opposition to charter schools or having concerns about their impact on the district’s finances are not among them. The Schmerelson resolution specifically asks the superintendent to analyze any external proposals for their impacts on the district’s finances and enrollment.

Soto said this wording could turn a largely symbolic resolution into a very practical problem for the board.

“I think (the resolution) is inconsistent with the law and I think they shouldn’t be adopting a resolution that includes a provision that is unlawful,” he said.

Further, board member Mónica Ratliff is introducing her own charter resolution today, calling for a wide range of information that charters must convey to parents to prove that their children’s school is in full compliance with state law. The measure would appear to bolster Schmerelson’s resolution, giving it a wider legal framework from which to act.

The wording of the Schmerelson resolution isn’t the only problem the board could have if it wants to oppose the Broad plan. For one, the Broad plan isn’t really a single plan and does not intend to create a new charter organization that would operate 260 schools, but rather seeks to fund an expansion of many different charter organizations already in operation.

Even if the board were to start denying charter applications, the management company can still seek approval by appealing to county or state boards, meaning they could still open in LA and still drain the district’s enrollment numbers.

Also, if the board were to start shooting down a lot of charter applications in an effort to curb the Broad plan, Soto said it could find itself in legal trouble.

“If they were to pass this (resolution), and then all of a sudden a few months down the line we see denials of charter petitions along the lines of the resolution and not provided by law, or for no apparent reason at all, then a court would probably say the board is potentially violating the law and then you also have this resolution that clearly articulates their position against charter schools,” Soto said.

The Los Angeles Times Editorial Board also found problems with the Schmerelson resolution, writing today that it “could backfire by making any future votes against individual charter school applications appear biased. The board is required by state law to approve all sound applications for charter schools.”

The resolution also calls on the board to oppose “all initiatives that present a strategy designed to serve some students and not all students.” The Times also found this problematic, stating, “Under this definition, though, the board would have to oppose many of its own programs” including magnet schools.

The Times editorial was headlined, “It’s time to stop the whining about charter schools.” While “whining” may be an overstatement, it does appear that swaying public opinion against Broad is a major part of a strategy by Schmerelson, Zimmer and UTLA to remind the public of what they contend are severe consequences of the Broad plan advancing. For now, public opinion across the state shows Californians have a generally favorable opinion of charters.

Eli Broad

Were it to come to fruition, the Broad Foundation‘s recently announced plan to expand charter schools in LA Unified to include half of all district students would create a system that is unprecedented in size and scope across the United States. LA Unified already has more charter students than any in the nation.

Whether expressing support or opposition to the plan, people on both sides have pointed to New Orleans as a rationale for their views. Why? New Orleans is the only major city in the nation where the vast majority of schools are charters, thereby showing what they can and cannot achieved when they have such a large presence in an urban district.

Aside from that, the Broad Foundation has invested millions into schools and organizations that operate in New Orleans and just this week named Paul Pastorek, who was education superintendent in Louisiana from 2007 to 2011, to oversee its charter expansion efforts in Los Angeles, making New Orleans all the more a model for LA Unified.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana took over the district and converted it to an all-charter system. But judging this as a success or failure proves just how polarizing the idea of charter schools can be.

The 10-year anniversary of Katrina passed in August, and news organizations large and small took an in-depth look at the school district. Did a consensus emerge? Judging from extensive media coverage: No, and far from it.

While the district’s students showed big gains in test scores and graduation rates, the means to achieve these results have proven controversial, perhaps showing the only real connection between Los Angeles and New Orleans is the conflicting, confusing and polarizing information Angelenos will be fed about charters in the coming months, should the Broad initiative move forward.

What follows is a roundup of media stories and commentaries on Katrina’s 10th anniversary, focused on the changes in New Orleans schools. By no measure is there unanimity of opinion:

Many will point to competition and choice as the drivers of improvement in New Orleans student outcomes. Though the validity of such claims remains disputed by educational researchers, it’s clear that competition inspires school leaders to make different decisions about how they allocate funds and expend their time and energy. US News & World Report, by Jerusha Conner

New Orleans students have learned more and they are better-prepared for college and careers than they were before the city’s education reform. Reason, by Savannah Robinson

Community members mourned the closures of public schools that had served as neighborhood hubs. Students at no-excuses charters described feeling like they were in prison, or bootcamp. Teachers felt demoralized, like they didn’t have a voice in the classroom. Parents complained about a lack of black teachers. In interview after interview, people said the same thing: The system doesn’t put children’s needs first. In These Times, by Colleen Kismet

The quality of graduation rates have dramatically improved from 54 percent in 2004 to 80 percent today, as well as gains in math and reading. Why? Because it’s not about the schools, it’s about the kids. Watchdog.org, by Amelia Hamilton  

There is also growing evidence that the reforms have come at the expense of the city’s most disadvantaged children, who often disappear from school entirely and, thus, are no longer included in the data. “We don’t want to replicate a lot of the things that took place to get here,” said Andre Perry, who was one of the few black charter-school leaders in the city. “There were some pretty nefarious things done in the pursuit of academic gain,” Mr. Perry acknowledged, including “suspensions, pushouts, skimming, counseling out, and not handling special needs kids well.” New York Times, by Andrea Gabor

“They just got beaten down,” Bigard said of her children. “Whether [the school system] is better or not, I don’t know … I’ve seen too many fishy things. I don’t trust the current numbers.” The Guardian, by David Uberti

In many ways, the move to public charter schools has been beneficial, but it’s not without critics: Some dislike how far children have to travel to school, since neighborhood schools no longer exist. Others find the application process too complicated. And, the rankings are still relative: New Orleans moved up from the second-worst school system in the state to match the state average, but Louisiana still has one of the lowest ranked school systems in the country. National Geographic, by Kelsey Nowakowsk

The charters, which have open admission and public accountability, have produced spectacular results. Before the reforms, New Orleans students — like overwhelmingly poor students in most places — lagged far behind more affluent students. Since the reforms, the achievement gap has nearly closed. New York magazine, by Jonathan Chait

Parent and New Orleans public education advocate Karran Harper Royal testified how New Orleans’ all-charter Recovery District has removed “choice” from parents. She pointed how out how charter lottery systems means “charter schools now choose families. They cast out the ones with expensive to educate disabilities or who test poorly.” The Progressive, by Cynthia Liu

Amid the rubble and rebuilding efforts, unseen by most Americans was a profound rebuilding of a major American city’s education system. Tragically, it took a hurricane to do this. But out of Katrina’s death and destruction rose one of the greatest transformations ever witnessed in American public education. Orange County Register, by Gloria Romero

“It’s not like the schools are great because we still have a long way to go. Basically we have gone from an F to a C, from abysmal to satisfactory, but enormous progress has been made.” International Business Times, by Lydia Smith

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Paul Pastorek

The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation said today Paul Pastorek, a former superintendent of public education in Louisiana who joined the foundation in an executive role earlier this year, has been appointed to lead the group’s efforts to expand charter schools in Los Angeles Unified.

Pastorek, a former general counsel to NASA, joined the Broad foundation as co-executive director of the education team, to serve along with Gregory McGinity, a former education policy consultant with the California Board of Education. Now, Pastorek is taking on a leadership role with the plans for Los Angeles.

“We have asked Paul to lead our foundation’s involvement in this particular initiative for the next several months, working closely with other funders and community organizations, until we ensure any plan reflects community and family needs for quality public schools,” the Broads said in a letter to “Friends” that was distributed today.

Few issues have roiled the LA Unified community more than the foundation’s plan to expand the number of charter schools in the district. An early report by the foundation said the goal is to serve as many as half the students in the district in 230 newly-created charter schools within the next eight years, an effort that would cost nearly half a billion dollars. 

It’s also a plan that district officials have said would eviscerate public education as it is now delivered by LA Unified. The LA teachers union, UTLA, has also attacked the plan as part of the Broads’ latest effort to “privatize” public education at the cost of union teaching jobs.

The Broads described the charter effort in the letter as “one of the initiatives we believe has tremendous potential is an effort to increase the number of high-quality public schools accessible to families in our most under-resourced communities. For the past several years, we have heard from parents, teachers and community members that there are not enough high-quality public school options, especially in low-income communities of color.”

As education superintendent in Louisiana from 2007 to 2011, Pastorek worked to establish more charter schools, to increase accountability and to increase private funding in education. His tenure was both praised and criticized for educational reforms efforts.

The Broads’ letter said, “Our work is designed to advance only one goal: giving every student in Los Angeles, and across this country, the great public education they deserve. We look forward to continuing to work with parents, teachers, school district representatives and school board members to develop collective solutions that are focused solely on ensuring that every student has access to high-quality public schools.”

Our poll asking readers to share their opinions on the Broad Foundation‘s massive charter expansion plan got lots of votes and even some national attention (thank you, Diane Ravitch).

In the end, it was a virtual tie between readers responding with answers that strongly favored the Broad plan, 980, and those strongly not in favor, 977.

Altogether, 2,161 votes were cast although we cannot be sure how many came from the LA Unified community or how many reflected the effort of people who voted more than once.

While it is important to note that our polls are unscientific and just a fun way to take the pulse of our readers, the results here do reflect just how polarizing and controversial the Broad plan could prove to be should it move forward.

The pro-plan voters reflected votes on two choices:

“I support the expansion plan because the current way of doing things is not doing a good enough job improving the academic performance of enough students” (693 votes) and “I love this idea because the school district needs more quality schools,” (287).

The anti-plan voters reflected two other choices:

“I despise this idea because it harms traditional schools by taking money and resources out of the district” (767) and “I don’t believe the charter people are really interested in improving education; I think this is all about weakening the teachers union (210).

A third option, which could be viewed as lukewarm endorsement of the Broad plan, was worded, “If the district paid more attention to improving the quality of existing schools, this idea wouldn’t be necessary,” and received 186 votes.

The plan is estimated to cost almost half a billion dollars and has sent shockwaves through the district.

Leaders like board President Steve Zimmer, board member Scott Schmerelson and UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl condemned the plan as a hostile takeover of LA Unified, while board members Monica Garcia and Ref Rodriguez are welcoming it.

Well, what do you think? Vote in our poll below and let your voice be heard.

[polldaddy poll=9130761]

Conducted over 10 days through Oct. 1, the poll comes as tension over charters is rising within LA Unified, spurred by a report from the Broad Foundation, describing a plan to create enough charter schools to serve half the student population of LA Unified within eight years. The estimated cost of the effort is $490 million.

As the poll shows, the plan reflects wide support among families who want more educational choices for their children, especially those attending under-performing schools. At the same time, it has been sharply criticized by the teachers union, UTLA, and others as an attack on public education, a strategy that drains public funds from the district at the cost of jobs and programs.

The teachers union is planning to protest the plan tomorrow outside district headquarters as the school board meets inside.

While the results of the poll are noteworthy for the margins of support for charters and more of them, it was, nonetheless, conducted on behalf of a leading national education reform organization that is the chief architect of the charter expansion plans for LA Unified.

Among the most notable findings of the poll, which reached 1,150 voters within the district in English and Spanish on landline and cell phones, were these:

• 74 percent of respondents support the expansion of charter public schools in neighborhoods where existing schools are struggling.
• 87 percent support “reforming the public education system” in Los Angeles.
• 88 percent  favor investing in district schools through proven programs like magnet schools.
• 69 percent want additional charter public schools in their own neighborhoods.
• 88 percent support making sure every student in a district with an underperforming public school has a choice of attending a higher performing public school.

“These results make it clear that residents throughout Los Angeles are eager to expand opportunity for students, regardless of whether it comes from charter, magnet or traditional public schools,” Gregory McGinity, co-executive director at the Broad Foundation, said in a statement. “The Broad Foundation is committed to working with Los Angeles families to improve public educational opportunities for all students.”

The margin of error of the poll was plus or minus 2.9 percent.

Hillary Clinton and Eli Broad on Jan. 20, 2009 at the inauguration ball of President Barack Obama.

With his massive plan to enroll half of all LA Unified’s students into charter schools, billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad is threatening major disruptions at LA Unified, cementing his role as Public Enemy No. 1 to many district and local union leaders.

But Broad’s enduring support for public charter schools now appears to be contributing to problems for an old friend, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, whom he has long supported financially.

Clinton appears poised to receive the endorsement of the nation’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association (NEA), this weekend, but the potential endorsement is causing controversy among many rank-and-file members. Similar outrage emerged when Clinton received the endorsement of the second-largest national teachers union, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), in July.

The NEA’s rank-and-file outrage is dominating many national headlines, just as the AFT outrage did, stealing the focus from what should be a public relations victory for Clinton.

Part of the concern is due to her past support of charter schools and connections to Broad, as well as her connections to Bill Gates and the Walton family, who are also major financial backers of charter schools that directly threaten union teacher jobs. An alternate candidate in the field, Sen. Bernie Sanders, a declared socialist with a track record of full-throated support of unions, makes a better candidate, according to some NEA and AFT members.

“[Clinton’s] labor credentials are significantly worse than her main challenger in the Democratic primary, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders,” wrote Huffington Post blogger and former NEA member Ben Spielberg, who also pointed out that Clinton once served on the board of directors of Wal-Mart.

“Even if she says things that today sound supportive, she’s not going to be a steadfast friend of organized labor,” Jamie Rinaldi, a teacher from Newton, Mass. and a union activist told Politico. “We don’t know she’s going to be the ally that’s going to stand with our legislative agenda.”

Almost 5,000 AFT members signed an online petition asking AFT to withdraw the Clinton endorsement, which came in July. One comment on the petition, which summed up much of the Clinton opposition, said, “The support that Hillary receives from Wall Street, and gives them in return, and her misguided support of charter schools clearly shows whose interests she is working for.”

Several NEA state branches have already called on the organization to withhold any endorsement.

“We are concerned that an early recommendation does not allow members to be participants in a real debate around the issues that are still unfolding,” Nebraska State Education Association president Nancy Fulton said in a statement Wednesday. “A recommendation this early in the process is premature.”

With most charter schools being non-union, the math behind Broad’s charter expansion plan in LA is simple to the LA teachers union president, Alex Caputo-Pearl: lose half of the district’s students, and his union, UTLA, will also lose half of its teachers. Caputo-Pearl sees this as a threat to UTLA’s very existence, which makes it strange when his two national affiliates may both end up supporting Clinton, who once said, “I stand behind the charter school/public school movement, because parents do deserve greater choice within the public school system to meet the unique needs of their children.”

The Clinton Foundation has even gushed over Broad’s charter school philanthropy. From the foundation’s website, which is referring to a 2007 donation Broad made to LA charters totaling $27 million: “[Broad’s donations] will have a far-reaching impact on improving the education of students in Los Angeles. By broadening the investments in charter schools in Los Angeles, a tipping point will be created that will put pressure on all other public schools in Los Angeles to improve the educational opportunities for all children.”

The Broads and Bill and Hillary Clinton have connections that go as far back as 1983 and as recently as Sept. 19, when Bill Clinton attended the second opening night of the Broad Museum in downtown Los Angeles.

The Los Angeles Times quoted Clinton at the gala talking about their friendship, which dated back to when Hillary was Broad’s lawyer. “I looked up one day and Eli was in my living room, and my life has never been the same,” Clinton said.

Broad, through one of his corporations, gave $100,000 to Bill Clinton’s presidential reelection campaign and was one of the controversial “Lincoln bedroom donors” who gave the then-president some bad headlines due to the perception that Clinton was using the White House to raise campaign funds.

Broad endorsed Hillary Clinton for president in 2008, has donated over $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation and was recently a co-chair of the Super PAC “Ready for Hillary” that was formed to draft Clinton into the 2016 race. It has since dissolved.

* Updated to reflect Ben Spielberg is a former NEA member, not a current one.

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But when all factors are considered, there is little conclusive evidence in the report outlining the expansion plans that shows big investments in charters always — or evenly routinely — achieve consistent academic improvements, raising an important question: Just what can Broad and other foundations promise for an investment of nearly half a billion dollars in an expansion effort that would dramatically change the nation’s second-largest school district?

The Broad plan points to three of LA Unified’s largest charter operators that have received Broad largess — Green Dot Public Schools, Alliance College-Ready Public Schools and KIPP Public Charter Schools — and says, “These organizations have turned our investments into significant academic gains for students.”

In some cases, the gains are clear, but in others they are not. One category shows a regression in test scores, and others that demonstrate only marginal gains.

The analysis looks at five years of “proficiency rates” for the organizations’ schools, spanning 2008-09 through 2012-13. Although the document does not explicitly say, it appears the data refers to scores on the old Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) exams, which were discontinued after 2012-13.

It’s also unclear what exactly “proficiency rates” refers to. For purposes of comparison with the new Smarted Balanced tests, the district and the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) combined the top two categories, “met” and” exceeded” standards. In the previous tests, the state broke down results into four levels of achievement, with one called “Proficiency” and a superior level called “Advanced.” But it’s not clear if the Broad report used one category or combined the higher two.

Swati Pandey, the Broad Foundation communications manager, did not respond to an email, seeking an explanation.

Over five years, proficiency rates for Green Dot students in English language arts actually decreased by 3 percent, while math rates at Alliance middle schools improved a total of 1 percent and English rates at the Alliance middle schools improved a total of 5 percent over five years.

Other areas are impressive — a 20 percent gain in English proficiency for KIPP schools over four years and a 13 percent increase in math for Green Dot schools, but the report does not discuss or examine the negative and minimal gains.

The recent Smarter Balanced statewide tests, which this year replaced the STAR exams after two years without any statewide tests, also show impressive results for the three organizations, but they also raised questions. (The Broad report did not include any analysis of the Smarter Balanced tests.)

Key in any analysis is the number of English learners and low-income students — two groups that have proven to be among the most challenging to educate — and these numbers never match up quite evenly between charters and traditional schools.

An analysis by LA School Report shows Alliance schools had 45.4 percent of its students meeting or exceeding the English standards on the Smarter Balanced tests, compared with 33 percent at LA Unified’s schools.

However, Alliance has far fewer English learners. According to its website data, 18.83 percent of its students are English learners, compared with 26 percent for LA Unified. And Alliance students actually scored worse in math, with 23.5 percent meeting or exceeding standards compared with 25 percent for the district. In fairness to Alliance, its schools have 93 percent of its students qualifying for free or reduced price lunch, compared with 77 percent for the district.

KIPP and Green Dot schools fared much better on the Smarter Balanced tests, with the percentage of students meeting or exceeding standards beating LA Unified schools by double digits in both math and English.

Both the CCSA and LA Unified exchanged blows in their analysis of the Smarter Balanced results. The CCSA pointed out that LA Unified’s independent charters bested the district schools, but it was only by 2.5 percent overall in the number that met or exceeded the standards. It then released another analysis that shows if district affiliated charters were removed from the equation the demographics matched up closer and independent charters scored better than LA Unified.

The district countered with a release that showed its magnet schools outperformed charters, but it must be considered that magnets have fewer English learners and low-income students.

Jumping into the mix is the Associated Administrators of the Los Angeles (AALA), which in its recent newsletter criticized the CCSA analysis, saying the “wins” of charters on the tests are diminished “when one considers that the enrollment of traditional schools includes 6% more English learners, who presumably would be at a disadvantage on the SBAC English language arts assessment (though they were apparently not at the same disadvantage on the SBAC math assessment). In addition, the traditional schools have a slightly higher percentage of students who qualify for the federal free or reduced-price lunch program.”

AALA also said that “the analysis presented in the CCSA press release is sophomoric advocacy at the expense of rigor. Serious comparisons may only be made between schools with similar socio-economic status.”

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“The reason why I’m concerned is because this is really a business plan that doesn’t address all students,” Zimmer said. “It’s a some-student strategy not an all-student strategy and the problem is, is that when you take that many students away from the school district, necessarily you are injuring the students left behind, they become collateral damage of this plan.”

Zimmer was asked whether the district is concerned about control of the money that is allocated per student. “On the assumption that it’s exactly and precisely the same students then that would make sense,” Zimmer answered. “But we know it’s not the same students, we know that the students by and large that go to charter schools are not the students that have the most needs.”

Following Zimmer, the acting CEO of the Claifornia Charter School Association, Myrna Castrejon, disputed Zimmer’s characterization of the plan, saying, “I’m not sure where Mr. Zimmer is getting his facts. Charter schools enroll 2 percent more ELL (English Language Learners) than traditional public schools in Los Angeles. With Special Ed we are dead even with traditional public schools.”

She added, “I think really it is about protecting the institution.” She said the Local Control and Accountability Plan now allows the money to go where the students go and added, “If they want to go to charter schools, they are welcome.”

Zimmer said, “The biggest problem I have with the plan is that it talks about market share, it talks about our kids as market share. It’s a business strategy for a social and public sector problem.”

He added, “It’s really a perversion of what the charter movement was supposed to be. The charters were supposed to be innovators for change. And once they were able to break through, which some charters have, the change was supposed to spread throughout the system. This is a plan to bring the entire system down, and there will be a lot of damage in that system. Not just to the entire system, but to real kids in real time.”

Castrejon cited statistics showing that low income minority students have three or four times a better chance of going to college if they attend a charter school. She also said Broad plan is “a wonderful, wonderful gesture.”

Eli Broad

Steve Zimmer, president of the LA Unified school board, said today that plans by Eli Broad and other philanthropists to expand the number of charter schools in the district represents “a strategy to bring down LAUSD that leaves 250,000 kids vulnerable to damage.”

A draft report of the plan appears show how the organizations involved would be creating the equivalent of a parallel school district, one with a defined goal of serving half the number of students attending LA Unified schools within eight years.

The “Great Public Schools Now Initiative” says the expansion would cost nearly half a billion dollars by 2023, through 260 new charter schools to serve an additional 130,000 students “most in need — low-income students of color.” Currently, about 151,000 students now attend charters in LA Unified, which has more charter schools, 264, than any school district in the country.

The 54-page report, dated “June 2015,” omits the names of authors or sponsoring organizations. But Eli Broad’s name appears at the end of a cover letter accompanying the report that makes a case for charter schools as “the greatest hope for students in L.A.” And alluding to the number of students on waiting lists to get into existing charters, now about 42,000, the need for more charters, he says, is urgent.

“We are committed to closing the waitlist and ensuring that every family in L.A. has access to a high-quality public school,” Broad writes. “Such dramatic charter school growth would address the needs of families who have been underserved by public schools for years, if not generations.”

He also argues that, “The stakes are extraordinarily high. In all our years working to improve public schools, we have never been so optimistic about a strategy that we believe has the potential to dramatically change not only the lives of thousands of students but also the paradigm of public education in this country.”

But Zimmer characterized the plan as a destructive one that would ignore the needs of thousands of other children “living in isolation, segregation and extreme poverty.”

“This is not an all-kids plan or an all-kids strategy,” he told LA School Report. “It’s very explicitly a some-kids strategy, a strategy that some kids will have a better education at a publicly-funded school that assumes that other kids will be injured by that opportunity. It’s not appropriate in terms of what the conversation should be in Los Angeles. The conversation should be better public education options and quality public schools for all kids, not some kids.”

He added, “To submit a business plan that focuses on market share is tantamount to commodifying our children.”

A spokeswoman for the Broad Foundation did not respond to numerous messages, seeking comment.

The draft report, a copy of which was given to LA School Report, represents the most comprehensive accounting so far of what the organizers intend to do, provided they can raise the considerable funds necessary. Broad says in his letter that $490 million “in new philanthropy” is necessary.

A full list of who is involved in the effort remains a mystery. So far, officials have acknowledged only the involvement of the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, along with the W.M. Keck and Walton Family Foundations — all leading players in educational reform efforts around the country. People familiar with the plans say the effort also involves more than a dozen other groups as well as wealthy individuals, some of them from Los Angeles.

The report says the Broad and Walton foundations are the initial funders for the effort.

The rationale for the expansion effort is based on the report’s assertions that charters do a better job of educating children than traditional public schools. Citing data from the California Charter Schools Association, the authors argue that charter students generally score better on statewide tests and have higher graduation rates even though it has widely been demonstrated that not all charter schools out-perform all traditional schools.

In building its case, the report is highly critical of LA Unified, the second-largest school district in the country, and its ability to provide quality education to young people in the city.

“Los Angeles has struggled mightily to educate its K-12 students, mirroring the challenges faced by many American cities,” the authors write, adding, “The achievement of students attending LAUSD schools is poor.”

It goes on to say that the Great Public Schools Now Initiative would serve as a model for other large urban districts so that “governors, mayors and other leaders across the country can point to Los Angeles as a city where a coordinate set of important investments significantly improved opportunities for students, families and the city.”

Even before details of the initiative were made known, powerful forces within LA Unified are already mounting efforts against the expansion. Among the opposition leaders is the LA teachers union, UTLA, which has fought long and hard against charters for years, arguing that they siphon off public money from traditional schools, attract a high percentage of higher-performing students and operate without the same scrutiny required of public schools.

UTLA, like its sister unions across the country, also oppose charters because their teachers are generally not union members.

Just two days ago, as the new Broad Museum opened downtown, UTLA teachers staged a protest rally against the charter expansion plans at the museum, aiming much of their invective at Broad.

Zimmer acknowledged that the foundations’ plans have opened a new front in public education wars that have roiled LA Unified and other large districts for years. This one, he said, would bring before the board a sharp focus on issues of choice and equality.

“The board,” he said, “has many strategies, tools and existing structures to raise questions about how quickly this could happen,” he said, without identifying them.

Besides the union and possible board opposition, the expansion effort faces several other major challenges, as well, which the report describes in detail.

First among them is finding suitable facilities for the new schools. Many charters have struggled to find adequate space, leading to neighborhood fights with public schools who share space with charters under the state’s co-location regulations. The report notes that in Los Angeles “available and useable real estate is scarce and expensive.”

Next, the authors acknowledge that the sources of “effective teachers and school leaders” are insufficient to meet the need of the expansion plans at a time the number of California teacher preparation programs is declining and a prime source of the charters for new teachers  — Teach for America — is producing fewer candidates.

The report also says the search for quality teachers will be hampered by UTLA’s new labor contract with the district that provides teachers a 10 percent salary increase over the next few years.

As a third factor, the report says the effort can only succeed through an strategy of finding quality charter operators, pointing out that the state charter association has taken steps in recent years to reduce the number of “under-performing” charters  and “growth for growth’s sake” is not the aim.

A final challenge is raising money. The report says the initial support for the plan from the Broad and Walton foundations “should help to catalyze support from other philanthropic sources.” It mentions no other groups who have made contributions.

The report lists 21 foundations and 35 wealthy individuals as potential investors — all of them worth at least $1.2 billion and many of the individuals familiar names, including Elon Musk, David Geffen, Sumner Redstone, Ed Roski and Steven Spielberg.

UTLA’s call for protest at Broad Museum

A few days after the posh parties with the likes of Reese Witherspoon, Orlando Bloom, Ed Ruscha and Frank Gehry to celebrate the opening of the new Broad Museum, the LA Unified teachers union, UTLA, is planning a protest at the museum on Sunday, aimed at its namesake: Eli Broad, one of LA’s leading philanthropists.

More specifically, the union is demonstrating against a plan by several foundations, including his, to create more charter schools in Los Angeles.

“We are protesting Broad’s plan to pull half the students out of public LAUSD schools and put them in unregulated schools that are not accountable to the public,” UTLA said in a press release. “The students left behind would suffer greatly. There simply would not be enough funding to go around.”

Broad has become a major target of teacher unions for his efforts nationwide to reform public schools through charters and an academy that trains executives to run them. The former LA Unified superintendent, John Deasy, was a Broad trainee.

The union also contends that Broad of “secretly funded groups” that tried to defeat Proposition 30, a state tax initiative that has generated millions of new tax dollars for California public schools.

“Broad and his billionaire pals wreaked havoc on public education in New Orleans,” UTLA president Alex Caputo-Pearl said in a statement. “His education ‘reform’ there resulted in massive inequities and civil rights violations for students. Segregation was reinforced and special education students were left behind.  We do not intend to stand by and let him do the same thing in Los Angeles.”

One speaker scheduled speaker at the protest, according to the union, is “a parent from New Orleans who knows firsthand how Broad and his billionaire pals can destroy a public school district because they did it in New Orleans.”

Whether Broad and other reformers involved in New Orleans schools after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 “wreaked havoc” or “destroyed” the school district is a matter of perspective, according to at least one study.

After the storm, the public school system was effectively dissolved and control of most of the city’s schools was placed into a state agency. Under the new agency, all the teachers were fired — most of them were union members — and management of most schools was turned over to charter organizations. The Broad Academy trained some of the people who were in charge, and most of the union teachers were replaced by young and inexperienced teachers from outside the state, none of whom worked under a union contract.

In his study, Douglas N. Harris of the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans argues that while many of the lowest-income and minority students did not return to New Orleans after Katrina for a variety of reasons, academic performance in the city schools rose among those who remained.

Another study found academic performance “has improved significantly — particularly among the schools that were once among Louisiana’s lowest-performing campuses”  but also said “far too many New Orleans charter schools are not yet adequately preparing students for college and careers. There is much work to be done.”

The California Charter School Association joined the protest against the protest with a press release yesterday, calling for Caputo-Pearl to “stop disrespecting parents who want to choose the best school for their children.”

For his part, Caputo-Pearl has challenged Broad to a “public debate on public education . . . . any place, any time — and that includes outside his new museum on September 20.”

The charter group said, “If Caputo-Pearl wants to debate anyone, he should start by debating the parents of the more than 100,000 Los Angeles students who have chosen charter public schools” in LA Unified.

Whether Broad intends to accept Caputo-Pearl’s challenge remains unclear. The Broad Foundation did not respond to messages seeking comment. Nor has the Foundation made any public comment about its charter expansion plan since word of it leaked last month, except to say some of the descriptions about its intent were incorrect. It has made no effort to correct those descriptions.

The UTLA protest is scheduled to start at 9:30 a.m.